Welcome to Episode 314 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
As an MSP, have you been lulled into a false sense of security? It’s hard for you to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years, right? But what if that retention was not because they’re in love with your service, but because it’s such a mind blowing event for them to think about switching to another MSP, so it just feels easier to stay with you.
If this hasn’t happened to you yet, are you confident that right now a client isn’t secretly looking into leaving? Here’s a simple solution to proactively work on your retention without having to do tons of extra work, and you might even generate some extra revenue along the way.
Most MSPs I meet are rightly proud of how long their clients stay with them. You’ll hear them say things like, Oh yeah, we’ve still got our first ever client from 10 years ago, or, Our retention rate is 98%. And on the surface that’s brilliant, but here’s the uncomfortable truth… a lot of that so-called loyalty isn’t really loyalty at all. It’s just inertia. Your clients aren’t staying because they’re wildly in love with your service, they’re staying because it feels too hard to leave. Think about it, moving to a new MSP is a massive hassle. It’s complicated, it’s risky, and they don’t really understand all of the tech side of it anyway. So even if they’re not a hundred percent happy, it’s easier to just stick with what they’ve got. That’s called inertia loyalty. And the danger is it gives MSPs a false sense of security.
You might think you’re doing a great job keeping clients happy, but the moment one of those loyal clients gets a real reason to look around, they will.
Maybe a competitor reaches out at just the right time. Maybe there’s a big mistake or your main contact leaves. Suddenly that inertia disappears and the client that would never leave is gone. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, I promise it will at some point. It’s horrible. None of us wants to think about it, but it’s also a wake up call. And the way I see it, we can prevent it. So what’s the answer? Well, you can’t just hope that loyalty lasts, you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to turn those stuck clients into bonded clients, the kind who stay because they genuinely want to. And the good news is this doesn’t take huge gestures. It’s about doing small things regularly that make your clients feel valued, connected and confident that you are on their side.
Here are a few ways to get you started…
Number one: Schedule regular non-tech calls. So not ticket reviews, not project updates, just a short friendly catch up every quarter. Ask them how their business is doing, what’s changed, what they’re focusing on, and just show that you care about them as people and not just devices. I mean, really this is basic account management and you don’t need a separate account manager to do it. You could make one call a week to a different client and achieve this exact effect. Interestingly, some of these calls will act as mini QBRs (quarterly business reviews), although I prefer to call them strategic reviews because quarterly is overkill. And what I mean by that is that when you’re chatting to your clients about their business and their future, some of them will give you opportunities to sell them something else. And when I say sell, I don’t really mean pushing something they don’t really want or need. I mean, giving them an answer to a problem that they already have. There are many more things that your clients would buy from your MSP if only you had more conversations with them and discovered what those opportunities were.
Number two: Share micro wins. When your team prevents downtime or spots a phishing attempt or saves a client from an outage, tell all of your clients. Don’t assume they know how much value you deliver. A quick email saying, Oh, we caught this before it became an issue. And maybe even if you sorted that out for another client and therefore you could stop it being an issue for this client, that would just help to reinforce why they keep paying you.
Number three: Celebrate milestones. Client anniversaries, staff birthdays, major business wins. Take a note of them and send a little message or a card or something like that. It’s simple, it’s human, and it helps you to stand out.
Number four: Ask for feedback and then act on it. Not just surveys, but actual conversations. Hey, how are we doing? Is there anything we could do to make life easier for you? And then follow up when you do something about it because clients really do remember that.
Number five: Keep showing them the future. Don’t let your relationship be about keeping things running. Be that MSP that nudges them forward. Show them new ideas, new tools and new efficiencies. Clients bond with the MSP that helps them progress. So if you do these things regularly, not as one-offs, but as habits, as a system that’s baked into the business, then you’ll build relationships that go way beyond inertia. Because real loyalty isn’t built on contracts or complexity, it’s built on connection, trust, and the feeling that their MSP is always looking out for them.
Generating leads and winning new clients for your MSP has nothing to do with coming up with creative marketing ideas. It’s actually much simpler than that. To have better marketing and win new clients, you need one magic ingredient. Let me tell you what that ingredient is and how to bake it into the very core of your MSP.
I’ve been back in the Wild West for a few months now. What’s the wild West? I mean the MSP sub Reddit, I do find it a mostly negative place where great questions are hijacked by angry people, hiding behind anonymity. They very quickly and frankly quite readily fire machine guns at other people just because they have differing opinions. Anyway, I digress. But recently I set up a new alerting system to tell me when anyone talks about MSP marketing on Reddit, and it’s been pinging away two or three times a week.
So I’ve had a good look through months and months of threats for the first time in years. And it struck me once again, just how many MSPs struggle with their marketing. In fact, they struggle not just with knowing what to do, but also they struggle with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce. It’s the magic ingredient.
I know lots of very smart business owners who don’t achieve anywhere near what they’re capable of because they can’t consistently implement well.
And the opposite is also true. I know of lots of average business owners who are doing very well because they are excellent implementers. And this principle applies not just to your marketing, but to all aspects of your business. I’d rather be a less naturally smart but good at implementing kind of guy than the other way round. In fact, maybe I already am. Now, luckily, implementation is not a fixed natural talent that you are born with. It’s something you develop, you improve, and you grow. And if you are struggling to implement great marketing, please let me help you.
Now that it’s November, most of 2025 has gone. So let me ask you a question. What progress have you made on implementing your marketing so far this year? If the answer is *hangs head in shame and admits*, actually, Paul, nowhere near as much as I’d hoped, then there are two ways that I can help you.
First, let me give you an out and out plug. With my MSP Marketing Edge membership for our 700 plus members around the world, we give them a system for their marketing, we break that system down into easy to follow tasks and we give them all of the marketing content that they need. And for those who struggle to get it done, we have a done for you team so they can get their marketing done for them. So you can see if that’s available in your area or not because we only work with one MSP per area. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. And the idea behind that is if your marketing is implemented by other people – and my team, that’s all they do, they implement MSPs marketing for them – you can see that that’s a powerful way to get it implemented. You essentially just outsource it to someone that you trust. Now, the other way I can help you right now is by giving you three easy ways to make implementation less of a headache in your business.
Easy way number one: Build marketing into your routine. So think of it like going to the gym. If you wait until you feel like it, it’s never going to happen, but if it’s on the calendar, let’s say every weekday at 9am or whatever works for you, then it becomes a habit. Book 90 minutes and protect 90 minutes every working day to work on your marketing. Close your PSA, mute Teams. Treat it like a client project, because it is in fact, it’s the most important client project you’ve got. It’s your own business and working on implementing stuff within your own business.
Easy idea number two: Don’t do it all yourself. You are great at running an MSP, but not necessarily writing blog posts or creating social media graphics. So just get help. You can outsource marketing to experts or delegate parts of it internally. Maybe someone on your team enjoys writing or social media, so give them ownership of it. And if you’re using something like the MSP Marketing Edge, most of the hard work’s already done for you, your job is simply to make sure it’s actually implemented.
Easy idea number three: Keep score, because what gets measured gets done. If you’re serious about consistency, track it. Use a simple spreadsheet or dashboard, list your key marketing actions and tick them off weekly. Sent your weekly email? Tick. Posted a daily post on LinkedIn? Tick. Asked a client for a Google review? Tick. You’ll be amazed how motivating it becomes when you can see visible progress even from small consistent actions.
So that’s it. Make it routine, get help and keep score. And remember, marketing success doesn’t come from doing big one-off marketing campaigns because you just end up doing tiny amounts of activity across the year. Instead, it comes from doing dozens of small actions, doing them consistently and doing them day after day, week after week. The MSPs who win at marketing aren’t necessarily the best marketers. They’re the ones who implement the most.
Featured guest: Nate Freedman runs two brands built for one purpose: helping MSPs grow. Tech Pro Marketing is the agency side: done-for-you lead generation. MSP Sites is the platform: websites and tools built from the same playbook he’s used for years.
His focus is simple: take what actually works to get MSPs leads, strip out the fluff, and make it easy for IT business owners to put into action.
Do you know exactly how much it costs to acquire a new customer for your MSP? If you do, you are definitely ahead of the pack because most MSPs don’t have a clue. There’s another side to this, which is what’s the average lifetime value of that new customer to your business? My special guest today is a true marketing expert and someone I’m delighted to call a friend, and he’s very, very good at focusing the MSPs that he works with on these two figures, and therefore how it affects their marketing. He’s also in the last year started being advised directly by Alex Hormozi, and you are going to love some of the big risks and the changes he’s made to his business since then.
Hi, I am Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing and MSP Sites. I help MSPs win new clients and it’s been my mission for the last eight years to do so.
And thank you so much for joining me back on the show, Nate. It’s been too long. And actually you and I were together a couple of months ago at ScaleCon25 in New Orleans. We were the naughty table at the back. So Nate found himself a table off to the left, there were about 400 MSPs at this amazing show, and Nate got the table at the back off to the left where no one could really hear us and we were just whispering little ideas to each other and occasionally you heckled some of the speakers on the stage, which was pretty cool. But it was amazing to hang out with you and I said to you, you’ve got to come back on the podcast. There’s so many things I want to talk to you about today, before we jump in and we start talking about them. And particularly we’re going to talk about ROI and we’re going to talk about your experience with Alex Hormozi, which is a very cool story. But before we start talking about those, for those people who haven’t heard of you yet, just tell us who are you Nate Freedman.
You haven’t listened to Paul’s entire back catalog because I think it has been about maybe five years.
Six years.
Yeah, so for me, I started a lot of MSPs where I was interested in computers in high school. Me and you, Paul, have a similar story where, interested in computers, got more interested in web and online marketing, that’s kind of where I developed my interest. So for me, long story short, I went on a website called Upwork about 10 years ago thinking about leaving my corporate career. And I got a gig doing a website and SEO for a hypnotist in Australia. Not going to go too deep into the world of quit smoking hypnosis, but every time that she got a new appointment, she made $500 and she loved the SEO work that I was doing because it was driving real revenue. Long story short, worked with a bunch of different niches, kind of similar to you. Eventually found my way back to the computer support world and then shifted my agency’s focus to only helping IT support companies, specifically MSPs mostly who serve their local market, generate leads and win new customers.
It’s been a journey over the past eight years. I think when I started, like a lot of people I underestimated the challenge, thought it was going to be as easy as that quit smoking hypnotist deal. But what I realised it was a lot harder, but also where I thought that $500 for every session she got, I thought she was the richest person alive. I realised that MSPs have so much more potential and that they can actually, with one deal generate millions of dollars in new revenue. And I don’t think that’s a stretch for a lot of the audience listening today. So I think it’s a good segway into our topic of customer acquisition cost and lifetime value.
Exactly that. And that’s one of the things that has always appealed to me when I’ve looked at, because obviously you and I are kind of slightly in competition with each other because you do marketing for MSPs and so do I, but we come at it from different angles. And what I’ve always loved about your approach and why I’m delighted to partner with Tech Pro Marketing, we send people to you, we send people to MSP Sites because you do lots of things we don’t do. And what I’ve always loved about your approach is it’s always been about ROI, that return on investment, and you and I know there’s like a thousand people that do marketing out there in the MSP world, and you are one of the few people who always brings every conversation back to ROI. So here we are as we’re standing right at the end of 2025 now, and we’re sort of just on that verge of 2026, the conversations that you are having with MSPs, are a lot of MSPs still coming into it and just saying to you, Hey, I just need a website, or I just need this, or I just need leads, or are more of them starting to have that conversation of how do we turn this from being a spend into an investment?
And I think it’s about this concept of meet your customers where they’re at. And we do, my brand MSP Sites is specifically about MSP websites. And that’s because I think on the surface level, a lot of MSPs, just businesses in general, in their mind, deep in their heart, they’re saying, well, I need to win new customers. But then that comes out of their mouth and they’re saying, I need a new website. And I think it’s just the zeitgeist out there. People just believe a new website is going to lead to new customers. The truth is, it’s not. There’s certain ways you can use your website and you can leverage it to get new customers, but a new website on its own is not going to do that. So I definitely start by meeting our clients where they’re at and say, okay, well, you need a new website. Let’s talk about that. A few questions in, I peel back a couple layers, it’s always about getting new clients.
I wrote an article eight years ago, I think one of my first articles that I wrote on Barracuda Smarter MSP blog was about selling on value, not based on the services. And I can honestly tell you, even though I wrote that article eight years ago, it’s taken me eight years to even get to the point of really understanding that and really facing this return on investment discussion with the clients directly. As a marketing company it’s scary and challenging as an IT company, I know there are some IT companies doing it as well. It’s less scary but more challenging. So yeah, at the end of the day, I think there are three core niches in all of marketing and in all of business it’s health, wealth, and relationships. And if you’re in the IT business or you’re in the marketing business or in the lead gen business, you’re in the wealth business and anyone who’s working with us, they’re doing it to see a return on investment.
And it’s interesting, you and I were just talking before we started the interview about some of the MSPs that you’re working with right now and some of the things they’re doing, and we won’t name names, but you just showed me one of your clients who’s generating more than one lead per day. And by lead we mean a qualified lead. So someone that has reached out to them and said, please, can you talk to us? We need some help. And we are recording this in the middle of October. And you were saying they’ve generated more leads and there’ve been business days in October so far, which is so cool. And then we started to look into some of the things they’re doing, and obviously they’re following all of your advice, their website’s up to date, they’ve got lots of content, they’re dominating YouTube in their local area. There’s lots of things they’re doing. Do you still see a disconnect between MSPs that expect to start spending a few dollars on marketing on Monday, and then they’re like, they’re upset because they haven’t got any leads by Wednesday versus the example we were just given there? Is that still a big thing? And does that mean you and I and all the other marketers in the channel have still got a hell of a lot of work to do in terms of educating MSPs?
This MSP really understood the value of a new client for them, and then they understood how much they can spend and how much they can invest to get that new client.
So this example that we saw, I think they’ve done an analysis that basically for all of the new managed services clients, they get the average agreement is around $2,500 per month. And then they found that their service margin, and these guys are very into the evolve peer groups and the ConnectWise and the service leadership reports, they want to be best in class. Their service margin is somewhere around 50%, probably their margin’s a little better, like 52-53%. So on average, they’re profiting $1,250 every single month for every new client. And they keep their clients, most of our MSPs for at least five years, usually 10 years. Many of their clients have been with them for 20 years already. So the average lifetime value in profit I’m talking about for this particular account is somewhere around $150,000. Their close rate on leads is somewhere around 40%. So you can see from that first part of the month where they got 10 leads, they might win four clients out of it. Not a math genius, but I think that’s around $600,000 in profit. So Paul, if I asked you, Hey, I’m going to give you $600,000 in profit, how much would you give me back? What would you want to give me back for that?
Let’s see. But when you put it into a question like that, it becomes so obvious. So here’s my follow up question then. Why isn’t every MSP doing this, Nate?
I think one is cashflow, realistic cashflow issues where it’s like this client has cash, they understand cash, they understand the power of it. So they’ve actually gotten investment to float their way through so they can put in this higher spend each month because to get that 600,000, I think you would pay a lot, but it would never make sense cashflow wise to pay 500,000 upfront for 600,000 in lifetime value. That just wouldn’t make sense. So you do need a significant amount of cash upfront to have a decent marketing budget. And then it’s probably just mindset after that that they’ve got the stomach for it. I think the issue that I’ve seen, maybe you’ve seen, and I’ve had myself as well, so I’ve seen it, but I’ve also felt it and I’ve done it, is I’ve been like, Hey, I want to add a million dollars in annual revenue this year and my marketing budget is $3,000 a month.
Exactly. And how do you match those two things up, which is always a thing. Nate, I can talk about this for hours, but I want to just change the subject just for the last part of the interview, because when you and I were in New Orleans a few months ago, you told me that you had recently engaged with Alex Hormozi. So many people listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube, will have heard of Alex Hormozi. Some people may not have done. Do you want to just tell us who Alex is and what you’ve started to do with him? Because as someone who is a distant admirer of Alex’s and reads everything that he puts out, watches, everything he puts out, I thought this was so cool what you’re doing.
I’ve engaged him as my advisor. It was definitely the most expensive thing I’ve ever done in my life. But for me, if you follow him, his journey, I think one thing that’s very cool about $100M Offers and then building acquisition.com is everything that he’s achieved in life, he is kind of proved along the way. So he takes a lot of big risks as he’s going. So one of the risks that he took is, if you read the first book, $100M Offers, is he sold off all of his gyms to start this company Gym launch. And actually he took a $1million loss when he sold the gyms because he wanted to be able to use that six month period of time that it would’ve take to prepare the gyms for sale to go and actually sell his new product, which was Gym Launch.
So for me, kind of putting the investment in with him, and I think in my opinion, I think probably your opinion, it’s the best advising money can buy. You know what I mean? I’m sure I can’t get Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, and I know one of them is not even alive anymore, but the other one, I am sure I could offer a million dollars. He’s not going to advise me. Do you know what I mean? This is somebody that is open for advising and he is available. So I think what I’ve learned from him, number one is taking risks in business, taking calculated risks, I was way too passive beforehand. And for me, the risks that I’m talking about right now is investing in education and investing an extreme amount in an advisor. So I didn’t take enough risks in investing in education.
Number two, hard work. One thing I learned there when I went out to visit their office is I asked about his sales team. I was like, how’s your sales team so good? How are they selling so much? He’s like, well, they get here at 5:00 AM and they leave at 6:00 PM I was like, what? And he’s like, yeah, and they work half day Saturdays as well. And I was like, that makes sense, because my question was how do you have time to do all the sales practice and the role plays that it takes to get good at sales and make all the calls, and they put an extreme amount of work. So the value of hard work, the value of wanting to win and enjoying your business. And it’s like, dude, well, you’re like a slave driver there. It’s like, no, everyone here loves hard work and everyone here, they move across the country to take this job where you’re going to work five and a half, 12-13 hour days every single week because you love what you’re doing. So I learned that there are people out there that want to work hard and love working hard, and I just need to find them.
I think a lot of MSP owners and small business owners, we have this kind of guilt where it’s like, I need to give my employees tons of time off. I need to make their life as cushy as possible. And I think the guilt is coming from the fact that we’re earning all the money at the end of the day. So we try to give them these really nice, we try to reward them with these other things because we’re not going to reward them financially. I learned that it’s like, no, I want my people on my team. I want them to work extremely hard and I want them to get an offer for $500,000 a year annual salary, and if I can afford it, I’ll match it. And if I can’t, they’ve done an amazing job for me for a few years and then they’ve set the culture. And think the last thing is just the leverage and just using leverage in your business. So we talked about YouTube earlier, and MSPs should be doing that. Alex, if you guys have been following, some of you guys have, some of you guys are going to go look him up and be like, whoa, what did I just stumble into? This guy used his personal brand to build so much leverage. So me and when I went out there for a day with these seven other business owners spent a fortune to get there, and Alex is really cleaning up. His minute rate is what most people make in their career. This guy earns so much, it’s such insane amount. He’s done that all through leverage.
He’s done that by creating the number one personal brand in the business space on Instagram, on YouTube, number one selling author, number one on Amazon, number one everywhere, given away all of this information. But the whole crazy thing about it is because he works so hard, because he’s so good at what he does, though he’s given away more information than anyone else out there, he’s actually only given away a fraction of the information that he really has. And he leaves the rest for leverage, and then he delivers on every promise. So when I was talking to their sales team beforehand, I was a little bit nervous, I’ve obviously never spent this much on education. I’ve joined programs that are $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month. This is in another league. And they’re like, well, has Alex delivered on every other promise? Promises in his books on the webinars and everything you’ve been to has everything delivered on it. Yeah, they have. So do you think this would be different? No, I don’t. And the truth is it wasn’t. And now I’m going back for another year. So is that the answer?
It is. And I have to say, and I think I said this to you a few months ago, the quality of the conversation that you and I had in 2025 was different to the conversation we had in 2024. And a lot of that I think was things that he had said to you and ideas that he’d put in your head and directions he’d taken you. And certainly, I’m watching what you’re doing with your business now, and it’s really cool, and you are doing things that I don’t think you even knew existed just 12 months before. So it absolutely shows the power of paying for really good advice.
And the irony of it is, his first book that kind of blew up was called a $100M Offers, How to Create an Offer So Good that People Feel Stupid Saying No. I read the book. This is in 2020 when it first came out, I read it, then I read it again, then I read it a third time, then I listened to the audio book, then I watched and listened to all his podcasts, I watched all his YouTube. I’ve heard it so many times over and over, but it took me really getting some skin in the game. And this is where I’m saying taking risks is so important to being an entrepreneur, because once you have skin in the game, then you really do it. And for him, he knew, I mean, if you’re an MSP trying to raise prices, just think about it this way, if he had charged me a hundredth of what he charged to go out there, I would probably be like, eh, the information wasn’t that good, I’m not going to implement it. But because as humans, we equate quality to price, and especially when it comes to the sunk costs we put into something or the investment we put into, you’re going to get something out of it. It’s like you go to Ariana Grande or whatever, the ticket’s like a thousand dollars, they sold out the first day, I’m telling my kids, we are going to have the best night ever, this is going to be the best concert, you’ll have the best night of your life. We’ll make sure we do. But we go to whatever, some other concerts, it’s only 50 bucks, whatever. We’ll leave early. We won’t have that much fun.
Yeah, absolutely. There’s definitely some lessons there, and pricing is, let’s be honest, is a quarter of a percent of the stuff that Alex Hormozi talks about. But yes, Alex Hormozi’s books, $100M Offers, $100M Leads, and then the new $100M Money Models, which I’m just halfway through at the moment. They’re insane books. Get them all, as Nate says, get the books, read them 15 times, listen to the books, and you won’t regret it. If you even do what Nate didn’t, which is you actually start implementing off the books, and I think everything you need is there in the books. But as you say, it’s implementation. This has been a fantastic talk. Thank you so much. Let’s just finish very briefly, tell us what do you do to help MSPs? So tell us about Tech Pro Marketing. Tell us about MSP sites. Oh, and how can we get in touch with you?
Great, thank you. So you can find me, our website’s the first thing, techpromarketing.com, mspsites.com. You can find me on Instagram, my handle is Nate helps MSPs. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can look me up, but it’s linkedin.com/in/nateFreedman, one word. With MSP Sites we have a platform and a system to help you get new clients. It’s a complete end-to-end system. It includes a full website, which we set up and build for you, and then a lead capture and lead generation system behind it. We integrate with MSP Marketing Edge with a few other partners to help with some of the awareness and brand building and relationship building elements of it. And then we also have a coaching and training program to help you guys with the SEO and the ads and the lead generation elements of it. With Tech Pro marketing, we actually do all that stuff for you. So a lot of our clients, they’ll come in and they’ll sign up with a package on MSP Sites, which gives you the full system and teaches you how to use it, but then they might upgrade and just go for our done for services where we build the whole system and then we run it for you. And our website is mspsites.com. If you go there, you’ll be able to schedule a call with our team and we will help you figure out what the right package is for you.
Hi, this is Ben Spector of BS Consulting. Here’s a quick fix you can make in your CRM today. Segment your mailing list properly. A lot of MSPs send exactly the same newsletter to everyone – prospects, clients, ex clients, even suppliers – and wonder why engagement’s low. First up, you can start with the lifecycle stage. Send lead nurture content to prospects, upsell or renewal reminders to clients and re-engagement campaigns to past clients. And then think about layering in personas. Are they a business owner who cares about risk and cost or maybe an IT manager who wants technical detail? And lastly, you could segment by industry – schools, accountants, law firms – they all need different messaging. If you’re using something like HubSpot, use active lists to manage this automatically based on contact properties and deal data. If you target your messaging, it makes you look more relevant and it will get you more replies.
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